Hospital Window

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke

ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins

tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State's

taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks

black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan,

offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven—The East

50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied

tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees

surrounding Rockefellers' blue domed medical arbor—

Geodesic science at the waters edge—Cars running up

East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital's oval door

where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls

trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked

penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few

Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances're

spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge

trestles. Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames

100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street,

& Brooklyn Bridge's skeined dim in modern mists—

Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible—

U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on

vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod

of a skull with a mild nerve ache. Dim dharma, I return

to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs

belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts,

head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek

mouth paralyzed—from taking the wrong medicine, sweated

too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from

gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus

not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez

World self ton billions metal grief unloaded

Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran.

Fresh warm breeze in the window, day's release

>from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle

and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile

deep into ash-delicate sky beguile

my empty mind. A seagull passes alone wings

spread silent over roofs.